


All Tied Up (Tie Me Down)

by veausy



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Freeform, Slice of Life, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-07 00:56:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16843915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veausy/pseuds/veausy
Summary: Once she sets the empty bowl down, one of his warm hands lands on her bare thigh, which is poking out from a loose shirt of his that she’d pulled on the moment she crawled out of bed. When her eyes flick to his, he lets his other hand settle on her other thigh, squeezing gently. “I’m sorry, El.”Or, five times Mike wouldn't tie his stupid shoelaces.





	All Tied Up (Tie Me Down)

**Author's Note:**

> Quick disclaimer: periodically, I get sick of saccharine timid babies Mike and El, so this is a bit different tonally. I hope you guys can still enjoy it!

The first time Mike trips over his shoelaces, it’s six minutes until the bell for third period, and the hallways are swarming with students, and his head slams into a locker on his way down, and El almost starts bawling right then and there.

He received a pair of obnoxious Doc Martens from his father for Christmas, and he’s a literal sloth in all other things appearance-wise, so upon unpacking the shoes from their box he had decided that the laces were more of a light suggestion than an absolute safety requirement. Despite the three times (in as many weeks) that El has warned him he would trip over himself, he’s refused to lace up, letting the rapidly deteriorating aglets swing stupidly as he lopes around.

He clutches his forehead when he manages to sit up post-wipeout, and El is next to him instantly, cradling his head on her chest and saying soothing things that she’s not really even thinking about. One of his cheeks is pressed tight to her shirt and the cup of her bra, while the other is warm under her palm, and she’s studying the red spot on his temple attentively, worrying about a possible bump, when she notices it.

He’s pillowing his face more comfortably on her chest, digging lower until his nose is caressing the skin of her cleavage, wide grin spreading across his lips. She smacks him lightly where she’s holding his face, indignant. “I thought you would _die_ , or get a _concussion_ , or bleed from your _head,_ and you’re busy – busy – ?”

“Motorboating you?” he offers, sly smile crinkling his eyes when they rise to meet hers. The red spot is getting darker, and her worried eyes keep glancing at it, but she scowls at him nevertheless.

“Tie your shoes,” she orders, hands on her hips as she sits crouched with her feet beneath her. “Or I’m skipping class and then telling Mr. Kim you locked me in a closet.”

He pouts, reaching for the laces and acquiescing easily, small smile still playing over his mouth. He stands first, offering her a hand up, but she jerks her fingers from his as soon as she’s on her feet, trying to hold onto a grudge that had already slipped past her minutes ago.

At the door to her classroom, he overtakes her with his long legs and stops in front of her, wide hands coming up to cradle her jaw, thumbs on her cheeks and pinkies low on her neck. “I’m sorry for worrying you. I promise I’ll be better.”

She glares some more. “You will always tie your shoes?”

He looks sheepish. “I’ll try to … remember to tie them … when it is likely to be dangerous … for them to go untied?”

She jerks his hands off her face, reaching for the handle of the door, but he leans in at the last moment and leaves a quick peck on her lips, already retreating before she can pull away – or pull him in.

She glances over her shoulder at him, and he’s throwing two thumbs up at her as he walks backward to his own classroom down the hall, and she blows him a kiss once they’re both at their respective doors. He catches and pockets her floating kiss just as the bell rings, and they both duck into class with smiles.

\--

If El thought Mike would mature throughout high school and start tying his shoes after his eighteenth birthday – well, then she was a fool. And she did think so. And she was a fool.

Their graduation ceremony is held outdoors because, for once, Hawkins doesn’t have a rainy spring, and the podium is set up in their big, verdant football field, wide stage decorated with blooming bouquets of various color combinations.

Their gowns are shiny and blue, and Hopper goes so far as to shell out a few hundred bucks for El to get a beautiful new white dress to wear underneath, silky and tight-fitting enough for Max to whistle at her in the dressing room but loose enough for Hopper not to scowl at her.

She manages to cross the stage easily in her clunky heels, smiling into Hopper’s camera when her diploma is handed to her and the principal shakes her hand, and her friends all cheer loudly as she turns to descend the stairs. On the third step from the top, a sharp gust of wind makes one edge of her gown float up, revealing the hem of her short dress, which has ridden up her thigh, and she shoves it down and blushes when both Mike and Max stand from the audience and wolf-whistle, receiving unamused glares from some students, staff, and the chief of police.

She clutches the shiny frame in her hands when she’s seated, raptly watching as each of her friends also receives proof of successfully completing this stage of their lives, but the way her heart pounds happily at the sight of beautiful, elegant Mike gliding across the stage under the bright May sun is nothing compared to the way her heart jumps into her throat and threatens to pop out of her body entirely when he trips and knocks into the podium, falling heavily onto his side. She’s standing before she even realizes she’s moved, hands over her mouth as the rest of the audience gasps and whispers.

He earns a few laughs when, while still lying flat on the wood of the stage, he raises one hand in the universal gesture of _I’m okay_ and smiles at the crowd, even bowing exaggeratedly once he’s climbed to his feet, mimicking his fall for the cameras and laughing raucously with the half-amused, half-bemused principal.

El slaps his arms, chest, hips, and back as soon as she sees him after the ceremony, using her still-limited anger vocabulary to grouse about how dangerous it was to fall on such a high stage, how stupid he is for still never tying his shoes, and how humiliating the whole thing must have been for his parents. They’ve wandered away from the crowd to stand under the bleachers, shielded from the heat of the sun as they air out their heavy gowns, sweaty.

He just smiles at her all through it, brushing her hair away from her face while she reprimands him, and then shuts her up with a deep kiss. They’re standing beside a pillar and a small protruding pane where the concessions stand usually is, so Mike hoists her up by the hips to sit on the counter, dropping soft kisses along her jaw and neck until she quiets.

“At least it was funny,” he murmurs into her skin.

She smacks him. “It wasn’t funny at all.”

He kisses her some more, tongue laving at her bottom lip until she bites it, gently but firmly, and he yelps. “A little funny?” he asks, lisping.

“No,” she counters, straightening her gown where he’d rumpled it, and then tightens his tie. “Lace them up. Now.”

He sighs but obliges, kneeling to tie his All-Stars achingly slowly.

“It doesn’t even take that long. How do you make it take so long?” she asks, exasperated.

“It’s an incredibly boring task, El,” he says, finally straightening and helping her to hop off the pane. “Now my tongue is sad.”

She rolls her eyes. “Have it talk to your brain next time you’re putting shoes on. Maybe it’ll have a convincing argument.”

He grins at her again and leans in, pecking her lips once, twice, and thrice, before they enter the stadium again to meet their friends.

\--

Mike joins the basketball team in their second month of college, and El attends the games – she knows that he knows how to tie his shoes. Why he picks and chooses the times and places to do it is beyond her. He’s continued to loosen the laces in all of his shoes and laugh off the risk, saying two falls in three years is a good track record, but she’s sure that any day now he will actually crack his head open and she won’t be there to help him.

Because he ends up being a veritable athletic star, her own social standing is elevated with him, and every time she takes floor seats with Max and the boys to watch him, she notices other students stare at them and whisper. She wonders what they’ll say when Mike cracks his head open.

Once, two months into their second year, Mike’s running late to the court after a job interview for the following summer, and she’s chatting with Max and their roommate Hoby, sipping on giant milkshakes, when the crowd suddenly cheers, deafening. She glances up to see Mike jogging out of the changing rooms, sexy uniform swinging on his lithe frame, and – her breath catches – untied shoelaces swinging on his stupid feet.

She wants to yell at him across the court, to throw her damn milkshake at him, but the crowd is obsessed with him and very loud and she’s panicking as she watches him sprint to his coach.

It’s not his own feet that betray him this time – though it sure is his brain – but he ends up falling inelegantly onto the squeaky floor when a fellow player steps on the end of one of his laces just as Mike moves to run to the side. With her hands over her mouth, El watches him plummet, as though in slow motion. His head hits a metal chair on his way down and he yells out at the contact, grimacing at the ground as one of his hands comes up to massage the point of injury.

Several of his teammates run over and help him up, the play still going, but five minutes later he has to tap out, and El runs to the sidelines to find out that his vision had been tunneling and he’s showing signs of a concussion. With a sinking heart, she follows the medical team as they help him out to the changing rooms again, sitting on the bench and holding his hand as he undergoes several tests and is, in fact, diagnosed with a mild concussion.

She smacks his knee as hard as she can once they’re alone, earning a yelp from him and a chuckle, which makes her even angrier. “One of these days, you’ll really do it, Mike.”

“Do what? I’ve already got a concussion, I got the highest score.” His grin is lopsided and a little sad, and she hopes that means something’s finally reaching him.

“This isn’t a joke. Your concussion could have been much worse, you had no control over how you fell. You could have had permanent brain injury.”

“El, I know, I swear I always tie my shoes when I’m playing. I was just in a rush and not thinking clearly.” One of his hands comes up to cradle her cheek. “Don’t be mad. I always tie them up out there. You know I do.”

She sighs. “If you tied them _all the time_ , you’d never forget.”

“But then I wouldn’t look as cool in my high tops.”

El frowns and shakes her head disbelievingly. “That you think you ever look cool at all …”

He dips down, kissing her on the mouth, and she’s wondering if they’ve perfected some sort of routine at this point. Mike does the stupid thing, El gets mad, he kisses her to end the fight, she lets him. For a moment, she allows their lips move together, but then she shoves him away and hops off the bench, fixing her skirt and grabbing her bag. “Hey, where are you – ?”

“You’re stupid, and I’m mad at you. You don’t take your safety seriously, and I have to watch it every time. I’m sick of it.”

“El,” he says softly, one hand extended between them like he’s not quite sure if he can touch her. “El, really. I’m sorry.”

“Show me,” she says. “Don’t tell me.” When he only blinks at her, she walks out of the locker room and finds Max and Hoby, who agree to ditch the game with her and go home.

\--

Mike gets marginally better after that. The next few times they go out together, he wears shoes that don’t have laces, and when she goes to his games, he seeks her out before they start and shows her the double knots in his laces proudly. Each time, she kisses him right there in front of all the students, sometimes with tongue.

One weekend morning, she wakes up in his bed alone, staring up at the ceiling dopily as she slowly gains her lucidity. He doesn’t share a dorm with anyone, his single unit small and cozy and littered with elements of both of them – his empty Gatorade bottles and her candy wrappers, his workout clothes and her lacy bras.

Mike has a morning practice today, earlier than El likes to be up, so she sighs contentedly and burrows further into his sheets for a brief nap.

By the time he comes home, freshly showered and pink from exertion, she’s lounging at his desk, one foot wrapped around the chair leg and another propped on the table, splayed inelegantly as she munches on some instant oatmeal.

The first thing she sees is a shoelace billowing up from the motion of Mike’s shoe, and she stares directly at it as Mike closes the door behind him and drops his gym back in the corner. “Hey, babe, morn – “

He doesn’t even have a chance to see her stony face before he trips over his goddamn laces and thuds onto his knees in front of her, crouched between her legs. He looks up at her with his jaw slack, and she continues to glare, furious.

“Okay, I know you’re mad,” he says, holding up one placating hand. “I swear, though, I was showering in the dorm today because the locker room was too crowded. So I came up here and I showered down the hall, and I basically just had these shoes on during the ten-second walk from the bathroom to the door. I swear, they were tied the entire rest of the morning. I swear, you know I’m trying to be better.”

When she only continues to glower, he raises his arm, which is muscled and veiny where it pokes out from his sweatshirt, but El refuses to be distracted. Mike points to several droplets of water. “See? I’m still wet. Would I still be wet if I’d walked all the way from the gym showers in untied shoes?”

El swipes the water from his skin and crosses her arms. “Extenuating circumstances, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. I don’t understand why it’s so hard for you to tuck the laces _into_ the shoes if you won’t tie them.”

He blinks up at her like she’s revealed some new-age magic to him. “Oh, wow.”

“You’re absurd,” she rolls her eyes, and goes back to eating her oatmeal. He watches her silently, awed, still kneeling between her spread knees. Once she sets the empty bowl down, one of his warm hands lands on her bare thigh, which is poking out from a loose shirt of his that she’d pulled on the moment she crawled out of bed. When her eyes flick to his, he lets his other hand settle on her other thigh, squeezing gently.

“I’m sorry, El.”

She squints at him when his fingers skim higher, raising the hair on her skin until they touch the hem of his shirt and push it back marginally.

“Can I show you how sorry?”

El swallows. His shoelaces are hidden under him as he sits there kneeling, so they’re easy to put out of her mind. In spite of herself, she feels her anger fading slowly. Plus, Mike keeps flexing his forearms when she glances at them, and she’s only human. She leans forward and buries her fingers in his hair, tugging him until he’s straightened up, elbows resting on her knees as he leans over her body to kiss her.

\--

For a cold winter date night a few months before their college graduation, Mike makes reservations at the fanciest restaurant in town, and El wears the white dress Hopper had bought her years prior, covered with a short wool coat that Mike says accentuates her curves.

Dinner itself is quiet and happy, Mike chattering about being scouted and the likelihood that he’ll get to play for several of his top-choice teams, and El listens proudly because she wants Mike to do what he loves. Mike gets recognized by several fans of college basketball, even posing for a few photos and signing some autographs, which is cool in and of itself, but one fan’s wife asks for a photo with El – saying that her honest and expressive reactions on the court floor are her favorite part of watching the games with her husband.

The wine they drink gets El perfectly buzzed, the kind of inebriated where she knows she won’t be hungover, but she gets to reap the benefits of her current wooziness nonetheless. The last time she was at this specific level of tipsy was the night Max announced that she and Lucas were expecting. She can’t help but think back to the joyous emotions of that night as she gazes at Mike’s perfect face and tries to count his freckles in the dim candlelight.

After dessert, Mike stands to get their coats and returns with a strange smile twisting the corner of his mouth. He points up at the chandeliers and the paintings decorating the walls as they walk to the door, and they wander out of the warmth of the establishment slowly, fingers intertwined.

Some light flurries have begun to fall, the thick white clumps clogging up the night air and making it look bright somehow, streetlights reflecting from the tumbling flakes until every corner of darkness seems lit up from inside. The streets are quiet, aided by the weather and the late week night hour, and their shoes make similar thumps on the pavement as they walk and murmur to one another.

At one point, there’s a lull in the conversation and El hears the worst sound in the world – the tell-tale plasticky noise of aglets hitting a hard surface repeatedly. She freezes, yanking her hand out of Mike’s hold and looking down at his shoes. They’re untied.

“Mike,” she grits out, body tight and eyes darkening.

“Whoa, look at that,” Mike says, loud and jovial. “They must have come untied. I know you saw me tie them before we walked out of the apartment.”

El remembers such a thing, but her response is instant, ingrained. She’s suffered this torture for six years. “Tie them,” she orders, voice low.

He smiles at her and kneels down, hands working at the laces quickly, and she glances around the street to find it utterly empty. Some storefronts are still lit, bright with holiday cheer and tacky winter decorations, and when she glances back down again, Mike is looking up at her with wide eyes and a hesitant smile, holding a ring.

“I – “ she gasps out. “What - ?”

“I love it when you’re mad at me,” he says, grinning. “It’s probably one of my favorite things.”

El blinks. “Huh?”

“From the very first time you shoved my face into your breasts, I knew I wanted you to do it forever.” Her jaw drops, making him laugh, but his hand doesn’t waver, still holding a ring that glints ridiculously brightly in the snowy night. “I might have enjoyed your care and attention too much, and I know you hate me for how flippant I was, but I’m not anymore. My laces have always been tied from the day I decided to be your husband. Please be my wife.”

El leans down, inspecting Mike’s now-laced-up shoes with a wary eye, before she plucks the ring from his hand and stares at it. “It’s so shiny.”

“It’s three carats, El,” he says, like those words should mean something to her. When she only blinks at him, he jumps up and smothers his grin in her neck, nuzzling her skin. “I love you.”

“Love you, too,” she whispers, wrapping her arms up and around his neck as she slides the ring onto her finger. “It’s really shiny.”

He pulls away, looking surprised to see the ring already on her hand. He cradles her fingers gently. “Is that a yes?”

El nods shyly, tucking her face into the collar of her coat. Mike’s hands slide down to grip her hips. “But I will throw it in your mother’s kitchen incinerator if I ever see your shoes untied again.”

He kisses her, once, lightly, and then doesn’t pull away, letting their lips touch when he speaks. “Deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://otpprompts.tumblr.com/post/179304676164/person-a-is-someone-who-doesnt-likeis-too-lazy).
> 
> All feedback is welcomed and appreciated!


End file.
